EN: This article focuses on the rupture between love and song — initially constitutive of lyrical poetry — and highlights how this disjunction contributes both to the reconfiguration of the romancers' art of love and to the invention of the genre of romance. When the poet-lover's voice is replaced by the narrator's voice, the new form in the vernacular initiates a new dialogue with music, and thus entails love itself to change its form and meaning. The first texts translated in the romance language are not only witnesses of these transformations, they express the tension between the two ways that were then used to express love: song and romance. By favoring the storyteller's disincarnated voice (as opposed to the subjective I of the poet-lover), the romancer takes the risk of mimesis: through his characters, he gives a body to the poetical voice of desire; he submits it to the rhythm and flow of time, and thence to the power of death.

EN: From the XVIth to the XVIIIth Century, the slow emergence of the notion of intimacy allows for a new kind of interpersonal relationships, the importance of which was fully grasped in the XVIIth Century. Amongst many discourses on love and friendship, at the wake of the modern institution of literature, the model of Tenderness which Madeleine de Scudéry imagined around 1650 can be seen as a multifaceted mediating pole pertaining to different publics and media. While studying the accounts of how Tender's Kingdom was invented and its aesthetic expressions, this paper intends to underline its ambiguities and tensions: the rich proposals of this model may be closely connected with its very fragility.

EN: Apparently, love for statues is one of those strange subjects, a kind of hapax and a perversion: stemming from the myth of Pygmalion and other stories of marble love, I wish to make the paradoxical claim that loving a statue reveals, quite on the contrary, the scenario and the deep structure of every fulfilled love story. That story, on the one hand, reveals the mechanism of falling in love and, on the other hand, amplifies the parts and attitudes of every lover. Thus, extravagance and perversion are what found the act of loving itself: loving is always loving a statue.

EN: How can we reflect upon a young artist who multiplies the images of herself, portraying herself as Medusa or as an oriental beauty, as a Buddha, as a weightlifter or as a Gretchen? And how can we theorize her renowned fragmented self-portrait, self-portrait in “checkers,” which echoes the portrait of another woman “in stripes,” a portrait which is equally divided? And how can we decode the photomontages — each more enigmatic than the next — conceived in collaboration with this same woman “in stripes,” and dispersed throughout the text entitled Aveux non avenus? What does it mean to “love,” when the object of our affection is our own alter ego? Can this love story between the self and the projection of self avoid falling into the abyss? This article reflects upon the notion of “loving” as it is elaborated by Claude Cahun: first, it will explore the issue of narcissism which is present in most of her self-portraits, her autobiography and her photomontages; it will then consider lesbian desire, stigmatized at the time as a “false mask,” despite the moral liberty reigning in the salon culture of the Left Bank. Next, it will examine the symbiotic couple made-up of Cahun, author-photographer, and Moore, graphic artist-painter, and explore how such symbiosis permits them to create works that are truly their own reflection.

EN: Film criticism and film theory usually consider the relationship between the different producing agents of a film as secondary, or, at best, as part of the “little story” of the shooting of the picture. It is as if one needed to separate the film from its own history for it to become the object of an aesthetic experience, which presupposes the autonomy of the work presented to the spectator's eye. I believe, on the contrary, in documentary films for instance, that much can be gained if we consider this “little story” more closely, since it can enable us to describe an aesthetic experience that is based on the perception of a figure of, and a desire for, community, both on the side of production and reception. This means that we should take into account the point of view not only of the director, but also of the people who are filmed, upon the reception of the film. What is at stake then is a common sensibility towards the possibility and the event of a being-together. We will thus be able to underline the pertinence of a new paradigm, that of the gift within social relationships, in order to rethink the study of documentary films from a socioaesthetical perspective, that will be more attentive to their specificity.

EN: If, by definition, love is always free, then it is also an exercise in freedom itself. The question is hence to examine love and liberty's mutual belonging to consequently better understand how freedom refers to the triggering of an opening, and how love designates the call that this opening forms and performs.